Weeds, Season 5 (2009)

Nancy Botwin's marijuana business inadvertently led to the complete immolation of her home town of Agrestic.  Now relocated to southern California (and sometimes to Baja California in Mexico), her ongoing efforts to remain one step ahead of the fallout of her previous desperate gambles inevitably lead to even more desperate gambles.

For me, season 5 of Weeds is very much a tale of two halves.  I thought the core arc with Nancy and her family was actually pretty solid (and ends the season with an emphatic exclamation point), but the misadventures of the ancillary cast - Celia, Dean and (especially) Doug - are tiresomely far-fetched and nowhere near as funny as the show seems to think.

A cut down version of this season that only focused on the Botwins (except the Silas and Doug as business partners bit, because it belongs in the ancillary cast cesspit) would actually be pretty solid.  Unfortunately, the actual season is a bit like a semi-rotten piece of fruit.  There are some sweet and juicy parts, but you have to be careful where you bite into it or you might end up with a mouthful of something rancid.

Overall, I'll still give the show a qualified recommendation, because the good bits are good, but be prepared for an uneven ride.

Rock Slyde (2009)

Private Eye Rock Slyde has two main problems.  The first is finding enough paying customers to keep his doors open.  The second is the crackpot cult "The House of Bartology".  The Bartologists have taken over every office in his building except Slyde's, and their leader really wants that last bit of real estate.

A new case seems like it might answer at least the first of Slyde's problems, but the Bartologists aren't going to give up on their plans easily.  And for all his brilliant deductive skills when it comes to tiny clues, Slyde's a bit prone to missing the forest for the trees: it might not be long before he finds his business in much greater jeopardy than he ever imagined.  Well, for certain definitions of jeopardy, anyway.  This is a man whose enemies are the "House of Bartology", after all.

Rock Slyde is a very silly but consistently funny bit of cinematic nonsense.  An affectionate riff on the noir films of the 40s, it's got its tongue so far in its cheek it may as well be a hamster.

If this kind of errant silliness is your jam - and it is mine, even if the movie does occasionally stray a little close to 'homosexuality is funny/embarrassing' for my tastes - then you should check this out.

Robot Chicken, Season 5 (2010)

The crude, anarchic and rapid-fire sketch format of Robot Chicken inevitably means that there will be some segments that don't work for the audience.  Which those segments are will of course vary from viewer to viewer.  I for instance don't find scatological humour all that amusing but from how often the show goes there, I can only assume that a significant portion of their audience considers poop to be seriously funny stuff.

More problematic than the toilet humour, though, are the show's occasional slips into treating homosexuality or transgender people as intrinsically laughable.  Yes, you can argue that the show lampoons everyone, but I much prefer it when they are taking swings at the privileged and powerful, you know?

Or punching the fictional, since this is Robot Chicken, and that means a lot of gags at the expense of early 80s cartoons, comic books, and other media properties.  In this season, for instance, you'll get to see what happens when financial troubles force Skeletor to sublet part of Snake Mountain, or what happens when you mash together Avatar and The Smurfs (it's ten times as entertaining as the James Cameron movie, that's for sure).  You'll also get an uncommonly long sketch that answers a question 100 episodes in the making: "what happens if the titular chicken ever gets free?"

Robot Chicken is an imperfect show, sometimes taking the easy way out on its gags.  And other times, it's so hilariously inappropriate and off the wall, that you'll wonder how an idea that crazy and wrong ever even occurred to them, and what kind of person it makes you that you're laughing like a drain at it.

Or is that just me?

Singularity (2017)

Humans invent an AI to solve the world's problems.  As is typical for SF media, the AI determines that humans are the problem, and initiates a global cleansing to solve it.

97 years later, humanity is almost wiped out.  There are only a few scattered enclaves and wandering bands left, but among those hope continues through the legend of Aurora: a city somewhere in the north, that the machine army cannot find.

The story from here revolves around Calia, a hard-bitten female survivor who will become disappointingly less and less effective as the film progresses, and a robotic infiltrator named Andrew, whose task - unknown to him - is to find Aurora.  I'm not spoiling anything by revealing Andrew's true nature, because the film tells us what he is in his very first scene.

If you're guessing that the unknowing robot bad guy is going to fall in love with the human woman and turn against his machine masters, then you're probably as familiar with SF genre tropes as I am.

So there are a trio of big problems with this film.  The first is that it doesn't trust the on-screen events to organically tell the story, instead overdosing us with narration and exposition-heavy dialogue.  The second is that, while it does have an explanation for how it is that the machines can't find Aurora, that explanation is extremely implausible in the context of the film's established setting.  Finally, there's the fact that the ending of the film is clearly more about setting up a potential sequel (or maybe a TV series - it feels a bit like a double-length pilot episode) than it is about actually having a satisfying conclusion to this film.

A recommendation to film-makers: focus on creating a good movie first, not on establishing a possible franchise.  If your film is good, people will ask you for the franchise.

Singularity fails to be at all singular in any way, really.  If you must watch a humans vs machine infiltrators film, and for some reason you're burned out on The Terminator, then can I suggest Cyborg Conquest / Chrome Angels?  It's also not very good, but at least it's fun.

Nikita, Season 4 (2013)

Nikita got a fourth season of only six episodes, leaving it well short of the  "magic 88" episodes needed for syndication, but allowing the show's storyline to be wrapped up (albeit in an extremely abbreviated form).  Was this a gesture of good will from the network to the show's remaining fanbase?  A ploy to make the program more attractive on Netflix (which was forbes.com's theory), or was it just one of those "who knows how The CW decides what to cut and what to keep?" moments?

At the end of the day, I guess the why of the renewal isn't that important: what really matters is if the episodes of season four actually deliver a satisfying ending.  And on that point, I can honestly say that it does a pretty great job of nailing its last five minutes.  The denouement of the whole series, where we see the characters moving on into the next stages of their lives?  That's pretty great.

The 5.9 episodes leading up to that point, though?  Eesh.  I mean, I know it's got to be hard to compress what was presumably meant to be a full season's arc into roughly one quarter of that length, but you know, maybe take the shorter length as an opportunity to really focus on the core of your program and excise the rest, rather than just trying to jam everything in at four times the usual pace?  Nikita's last season is a succession of blink and you'll miss it plot twists and double-dealings that ignores the show's greatest strength (the chemistry between the "core four" characters) in favour of a murky scripting mess with contrived revelations and coincidences that simply don't hold water.

Those last five minutes really are pretty good, though.

Jubilee (1978)

Elizabeth I directs her advisor, John Dee, to summon an angel.  This Mr Dee duly does, and the queen bids the holy messenger to show her a vision of England's future.

She's not going to like what she sees.

London is half in ruins, with roaming gangs of punks committing random acts of violence and robbery, or being themselves the targets of equally random violence by the police.  Many of the future scenes revolve around a group of mainly female punks who have, among other criminal acts, recently mugged and murdered Elizabeth II.

About the only functional - if that is the right word - aspect of this future society appears to be the entertainment industry, and while I hesitate to use the term sub-plot in relation to a movie that is largely plotless, there are a number of scenes which revolve around the world of popular music.

Jubilee is not what I would call a "good" film, with a meandering script and dialogue that is often rather more purple than the actors can convincingly manage, but the circumstances in which it was made make it a culturally an interesting one.  It was filmed at the height of the punk movement, and seems to earnestly - if not necessarily successfully, based on the response of some prominent punks of the time - attempt to reflect the attitudes and politics of the subculture.  Those attitudes included a substantial dose of nihilism, and when you realise that the rubble-strewn areas of London shown in the film actually looked like that, including some areas that were still not cleaned up from World War 2, you begin to have an understanding of why some people of the time felt there was "no future".

Archer, Season 5 (2014)

Going into season five of Archer, I knew two things about it:

1. It was generally considered weaker than the preceding 4 seasons; and
2. It saw Archer and his colleagues shift their activities from espionage to organised crime. 

Now I'm not sure if it was lowered expectations from the first point, or simply not being blind-sided by the second, or perhaps a combo of the two, but I had a thoroughly good time.

I mean sure, I can definitely see why you might get whiplash if you went in blind.  The changes could easily be pretty jarring if you aren't expecting them.  Not only do the gang move into a new industry but three of the characters go through pretty major changes (while at the same time, paradoxically not actually changing at all).  The status is not quo, and yet it is.

There are certain jokes that are ridden a little too hard and too long in this season, and I can also see that being an issue, as well, but even those I ultimately felt mostly had pay-offs that worked.

Crass, brash and not afraid to mercilessly lampoon its main cast (who, let's face it, thoroughly deserve every bad thing that ever happens to them), Archer season five is more of the same thing they've been doing all along, while at the time being not at all what they've been doing before now.  That's worthy of the tip of my hat, I think.

2035: Forbidden Dimensions (2013)

All the children born on the night of a solar eclipse around 1980 are special.  They're also, with one exception, all dead.  The last of these "Solar Eclipse Kids" is Jack Slade, who had the ability - though he can't control it - to move back and forth between the "current day" of the late 1990s and the blasted wasteland that is 2035.

You see, it seems that some evil doctors got a hold of alien DNA and used it to create vicious mutants.  This somehow led to everything looking like Mad Max, except with a lot more topless women dotting the backgrounds.

The film hops back and forth between these two time zones - not in chronological order within either of them - in what's presumably meant to be a "mysterious" manner, but is actually mostly just incoherent except when one character or another is delivering a massive info dump of exposition.  And sometimes even then.

Christopher James Miller wrote and directed this film, and also has six other credits on it.  Or seven others, if you count both the on-screen roles he plays as separate credits.  No doubt the film was a labour of love for him, and he certainly shows an ambition that stretches well beyond the obviously tiny budget he was working with.  Unfortunately, based on the final product here, it's also an ambition that stretches well beyond his talents.  The film he's delivered in a plodding narrative mess with wildly uneven acting and effects.

I'd be interested to see what Miller can do if he tries to deliver half as much, twice as well, but in the meanwhile I certainly won't be recommending this film.

Breaking Bad, Season 4 (2011)

This is a review of season 4 of a show, so it's going to be somewhat spoilerific about the earlier seasons.  If you want to watch the show - and overall, I think it is worth seeing - and you want to do so unspoiled, you should probably bail now.

Walter White is raking in the cash as a top tier crystal meth 'cook', but his arrogance and anger has put him at serious odds with the ruthless criminals for whom he works.  The only thing that's saving him is that no-one else can make the product like he can: a protection White will go to extreme lengths to maintain.  After all, his life is on the line.

It feels to me the Walter White we see now is a much more authentic character than we saw in the first couple of seasons.  "Ordinary man driven to extreme measures to provide for his family" feels more and more like it was a not very convincing act and the ruthless narcissist he's become is the real Walter.  He's still physically weak of course - he is after all a 50 year old cancer survivor with a sedentary job - and he still makes plenty of mistakes because his arrogance gives him big blind spots.  But I'm very glad that the awkward physical humour and "fish out of water" spots from early seasons are in the past.  The show feels more focused in this season than it has before now, and I found myself thoroughly engaged even though I continue to think Walter is a terrible person.  It helps, I think, that the show is no longer trying to make Walter a sympathetic character.  There were times last season where they were trying to build up a sense of jeopardy about his safety and my reaction was "damn it, stop taunting me with the possibility he'll get what he deserves".  The absence of that irritating niggle allowed me to simply enjoy the bastardy displayed by all and sundry.  Which is as it should be in a show like this, I think.